#nephistuck

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

this scene where dave sees john in person for the first time is SO CUTE. dave is so fucking nervous, look at that wobbly pixel mouth. he whispered wow 3 times and only said hi after being prompted by karkat lmaoo. and karkat watching them interact with this dumb little smile bc he knows just how excited dave is. UGH love them

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

i wanna add that as soon as davesprite becomes davepeta and loses the sword of forced heroism/masculinity, they are immediately ready and eager to jump into action. davepeta being the one who ultimately brings down lord english in the epilogues really solidifies that the issue is not heroism or masculinity itself, but being forced into it. as soon as they were free from expectations/destiny and allowed to be whatever they wanted, davepeta chose to be a hero. they could have been irrelevant like most of the sprites were, and nobody would have cared, but they didn't. davepeta wanted to fight lord english, and not because they were "supposed" to.

what it says to me is that dave likely would have become a hero independently, if he'd been allowed a choice, but because he was violently forced into that role, it ultimately destroyed him. notably, the version of dave that did fight lord english had his head bitten off, before the villain who is the embodiment of toxic masculinity was finally defeated by the first nonbinary character in homestuck. like holy shit.

anyway, i think it says a lot about dave's relationship with his gender. maybe dave's Cool Guy presentation is what he'd choose in a different environment, but because he had no choice and was forced to perform masculinity for his survival, it's destroying him.

Pondering the sword as a symbol, in the context of Davepeta's arc. In the author commentary, it is said that the unbroken sword is representative of "The fully manifest, wholly embraced heroic arc. Suppressing reservations, answering the call, putting the tough training to use, despite the cost to oneself."

How fitting then, that Davesprite is impaled with one. This is an extremely obvious cost but also presents the question: what does all that really mean if you aren't the hero anymore? Post-retcon, they become part of Davepeta, their life and self are again irreconcilably changed when they become themself. I have an angle to look at this from. Dave connects their relationship with heroism, and thus the sword symbolism, to his relationship with masculinity.

"living up to the storybook idea of what a hero to me feels almost interchangeable with living up to societys snapshot of what a hard manly dude should be"

Fascinating in the context of Davepeta being nonbinary, and additionally, not wielding a blade. The dichotomy of broken/unbroken swords left behind for something new.

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

this passage means way more to me than any amount of davekat smut that they could have written into the epilogues.

"he believes he could spend forever with him, in any configuration, any type of relationship, under any conditions of confusion or clarity." holy fucking shit i could cry. he doesn't care what they are, as long as they are.

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

i actually think it's so fucking romantic that in the epilogues, dave would rather never make a move on karkat than risk poisoning their relationship with the "conditioning" of his bro. every time he had a romantic or sexual thought about karkat, he had to feel it through dirk's narration, and scrutinize it against his trauma, and even without conscious awareness of why, he was still like No. karkat is the one thing my bro will not touch, even if that means i don't get to either.

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

this is a big reason why i just cannot get behind erisol as a ship. fighting is not always romantic for trolls! sometimes the other guy is just a bigoted maniac about to get you and all your friends killed, and you know you're the only one around powerful enough to stop him. there's no way sollux respects eridan enough to feel genuine black feelings for him

it’s amusing that people will understand right away that “pity” is a metaphorical/alien term for something wayyyy more than just pity (for example. you never see takes about how unhealthy it is for trolls to only date people that they look down on for being pathetic) but nobody wants to see “hate” the same way. hate is always just “hate” and its gross and evil and toxic despite that textually not being the case in comic

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

i actually expected the first acts of homestuck to be a lot more boring than they have been, but i have had the privilege of reading them aloud in character voices with a seasoned homestuck, so yeah i basically won the babyhomestuck lottery

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

i love reading davekat shit from dave's perspective bc he's SO much more of a mess about it than karkat. karkat's like "gdi he's so pathetic i cant help but love him" and dave's like "fuck fuck fuck he's everything he's god he's beyonce and obama at the same time fuck fuck fuck"

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

dave & karkat both having nightmares after the game but dave's has him leaping out of bed throughout the night, and karkat's has him trapped in an inescapable paralysis hell that he can barely be woken up from

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

he gives bard vibes to me. bard of heart? although bard of light would be kind of hilarious. someone else said muse of rage and that's honestly incredible

have we classpected jar jar binks?

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

no see the strilondes know about their issues (a good chunk of them, at least) but are terrified of changing and losing the familiarity of whatever pain they're used to. what if the new pain is worse? that, or they're convinced they can't/don't deserve to change. the harleyberts though....... they're scared to even LOOK at themselves.

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

fic in which transmasc dirk creates a body for hal in his image, but leaves off the tits bc he assumes hal won't want them. when hal occupies the body and realizes, he throws a huge fit about it that completely bewilders both of them. this is how they figure out that they do not, in fact, share a gender or relationship with their body.

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

i rewatched once i was a beehive again for the first time since i was a teenager, just to inspire ideas for my mormonstuck au, and yes it was incredibly cheesy and pretty bad overall, but it was also a close enough replication of the girls camp experience to remind me how fucking manipulative mormon culture is.

like i actually started tearing up more than once, not because the movie was particularly moving, but because i was fucking trained to have these emotional reactions. not to sound really dramatic but girls camp is basically just a machine designed to squeeze out as many tears as possible from these teenage girls and convince them that it's because they're "feeling the spirit".

don't even get me started about the letters from home because i will cry even tho it's been 8 YEARS since i left the church! i didn't even realize that girls camp had fucked with my head so much, i thought i was good! but no, i watched one dumb movie and suddenly all the trigger responses popped their gross little heads up to remind me that they're all still in there, just kinda buried under a bunch of leaf piles where i can't see them

anyway that aside, i can't wait to give the homestuck trolls my mormon girl trauma LOL. hmu if you have mormon trauma (esp mormon boy trauma, bc i have less experience there) and wanna help brainstorm the trolls as utah mormons

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

yesyesyes about roxy being commentary on cishet girls being predatory towards gay boys. it happens so much, and i recall the objectification of gay boys by supposed cishet women to have been a particularly big problem in fandom spaces in the years homestuck was originally updating. even the wizard story that roxy was writing heavily featured a mlm romance, which i think was done intentionally to drive in the point. but it's been over a decade since then, and as it turns out, a great deal of these "girls" who were obsessed with gay boys were just... not girls, and were using fandom spaces as an outlet for their confusing queer feelings. (totally not speaking from experience here haha.)

so, by making roxy transmasc, the homestuck team expanded on some unresolved social commentary from earlier in the comic, and provided an explanation for roxy's behavior. not an excuse, mind you! roxy's behavior toward dirk was still harassment and sexual assault, but it would feel far more sinister if these were the actions of someone who was aware enough to have already figured out their identity, and then chosen to ignore dirk's, rather than a teenage "fangirl" reacting poorly to confusion about their own gender and sexuality.

not to mention the fact that there is already another transgirl-coded character (vriska) who also sexually assaults someone (tavros) within the story. making it two for two would turn it into a pattern in the story, which would be a really bad look. honestly, i just don't think trans girl roxy was ever going to be a viable option within actual canon, because all it would contribute to the story is an undertone of transmisogyny that wasn't there in the first place.

expanding on this thing i said a minute ago cause i have more thoughts about it [pointing down emoji]

we DO need canon trans characters who are also sucky people, but they need to be written as trans from the start. not written as cis and then retconned as trans by the author

if an author retcons a cis character whos been written as sexually/romantically agressive (bc for all i love her roxy is written like that) as a trans girl, what does that imply. how did the author get there. what exactly about that character made the author think that the toxic character they wrote as cis would be made better by actually being trans. its a cop out for writing a trans character from the start at the very least, and deeply uncomfortable and edging into TERF rhetoric towards the worse end. id love to have a canon transfem roxy but i wouldve liked to have her from the start. i want trans characters who fuck up and are awful to other people and themselves, especially when theyre deeply traumatized teenagers, but i want them to be trans from the start

none of this is to say that this kinda shit doesnt happen between trans folks irl. like of course it does. anyone can be shitty and toxic especially when it comes to unrequited crushes. but i think canon roxy was specifically supposed to try to portray how cis(het) girls can get aggressive when their advances on gay boys arent welcomed. because, yknow, theyre gay. even if roxy and dirk do love the fuck outta eachother (and oh my god they do), theyre romantically incompatible. thats the main point of contention and drama between them. cis(het) girls feeling entitled to gay boy's bodies/attention/time, despite their actual relationship with them. which is why i pretty strictly read canon dirk+roxy the way i do, and then play dolls with them in any way i want in my separated mind pallace. bc im mindful of transmisogynistic dogwhistles as part of my brains like, base code. maybe overly so, i dont know. i get caught by the ocd with this and i know it. but like my whole SYSTEM is trans and were sure as shit not excempt from transmisogyny ourselves. any kind of bigotry or discourse about any trans issue catches us in the middle. its rough out here man

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

this exchange being immediately followed by dave getting the absolute shit kicked out of him by his bro is such a clear statement (': kids are inclined to think their experiences are universal. he says it more explicitly later but dave literally thinks his friends are also getting beat up by their guardians.

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

hey you ever think about the fact that sollux likely heard his own ancestor die? probably one of the last things he heard before he died himself. did he hear his own psychic screams? did sollux & the psiioniic psychically scream and then die simultaneously? does that count as another duality thing?

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

damn... can't believe john's dad died on his birthday, and the last time john saw him, he was pretty much like "ugh leave me alone dad, i don't want your stupid cakes!"